THE COOKBOOK TEST #0091: BY HEART (REVIEWED BY GUEST CONTRIBUTOR LINDSAY CHRISTIANS)

INSTALLMENT #0091 (FREE) HELLO, I’M THE SUB / SIGNATURE MOVES / SPICY CARROT RIGATONI / CRACKERS AND FISH FRY

Dear Readers, 

Leave it to an influencer on a platform I do not use to get me, a lifelong Midwesterner, to make a real Midwestern fish fry for the first time. 

Hello! I’m Lindsay — northwest Ohioan-turned-Wisconsinite, cookbook lover/author, buddy of James. I do food and culture journalism in Madison, Wisconsin. I’m a middling cook and a pantry maximalist. 

I recently texted James while I was browsing Omnivore Books in San Francisco to propose that we should all own one cookbook from each major cuisine/region. In practice, though, I’m a generalist. I have a soft spot for Ina Garten, Julia Turshen and Dorie Greenspan. I cooked all 98 recipes in Molly Baz’s Cook This Book. With Melissa Clark’s Dinner, I would close my eyes and open to a random page, a technique I used with the Bible as a young (former) evangelical. 

Hailee Catalano’s By Heart has generalist vibes. Catalano’s first cookbook was published in April by DK Books, the same Penguin Random House imprint that put out TikTokker B. Dylan Hollis’ megahit Baking Yesteryear (as well as his latest, Baking Across America). 

Catalano is a Chicago native and professionally trained chef who started making cooking videos in 2021. As of this writing, she has 1.9 million followers on TikTok. She influences. She “partners with.” She is very sponsored. I was very skeptical. 

After 10 recipes from By Heart, I’d call Hailee — let’s call her by her first name, I’ve decided we’re pals now — an influencer in the Claire Saffitz vein. She’s that friend who gushes about making her own pizza and goes hard on the holidays, more Deb Perelman (whose recipes work) than Tieghan Gerard (ahem). With influences from her Midwestern upbringing, Italian American grandma, seven years in restaurant kitchens and current life in New Jersey, “By Heart” is a strong debut from a friendly new voice. 

Let’s get into it. Cheers!

Lindsay

BY HEART
BY HAILEE CATALANO
DK BOOKS | 2025 | $35

Most of what I have to say about By Heart will be positive, but right at the top, the organization is weird. It’s just choppy — among straightforward sections like “Seafood: From the Lake to the Shore” and “Seasonal Pastas” are a “Sourdough Crash Course” and a trio of broths shoved in, nowhere near a soup. One full section is three snacks. This looks like sloppy trimming of a book that got too long (which happens with every cookbook, I think) and was rushed to print. 

Ours is a crispy protein house, so I started with Hailee’s chicken milanese, pulling out the rack-and-pan combo I bought for Eric Wareheim’s “Foodheim” [1] and my trusty meat pounder. I was that weird kid who liked raw mushrooms, so I loved the shaved mushroom and celery salad with red onion that went along with this. 

Lesson one: Hailee’s good with seasoning, but not so great at estimating thickness (something that will come up again). Or maybe I over-pounded? At ¼ inch thick, my chicken tenders fried too fast and hard, and got a little tougher than I’d have liked. 

I added Calabrian chilies one at a time, first seeded and then whole, to the blender for spicy carrot fusilli (rigatoni in the book). Even with the whole amount, the heat felt mellow. This was the first recipe I fell in love with — creamy dreamy, a glorious receptacle for the roughly 1,200 carrots I’m sure to get in the CSA this summer. It features one of Hailee’s signature moves, a textural topping, usually with herbs and citrus. 

If you have young carrots, you don’t even really need to peel them. Make this pasta. Make the whole recipe, reheat leftovers the next day, be happy. 

SPICY CARROT RIGATONI

Serves 4-6 

Pasta
1 lb. bunch carrots with tops, about 6 medium carrots peeled, cut into pieces, tops reserved
4 cloves of garlic, peeled
1/2 cup grated pecorino romano cheese, plus more for serving
1/2 cup olive oil
1/4 cup water
1 Tbsp toasted pine nuts
3-4 Calabrian chilis (note: do all of this, don’t even take the seeds out)
Kosher salt and pepper, to taste
1 lb. rigatoni (or whatever short pasta you have)
Ricotta, for serving, if desired

Salsa Verde

1/4 cup finely chopped reserved carrot tops
1/4 cup finely chopped fresh parsley
1/4 cup olive oil
1 Tbsp capers, chopped
Zest of 1 lemon
Juice of 1/2 a lemon
Kosher salt and pepper, to taste

Steam carrots and garlic until very tender, about 12-15 minutes. Transfer to a blender. 

Add in pecorino, olive oil, water, pine nuts, and Calabrian chilis and blend until very smooth. Blend, blend, blend! Season with salt and pepper to taste. Set aside.

Bring a large pot of water to a boil over high heat. While water boils, mix everything for the salsa verde together in a small bowl. Set aside.

Heavily season the boiling water with salt. Drop pasta into the boiling water and cook until al dente.

Strain pasta and add to a large skillet over low heat, along with a good splash of pasta water. Pour in carrot sauce. Toss to combine. Add as much pasta water as needed to thin out the sauce so that it coats the pasta evenly.

Season with more salt and pepper if needed. Serve pasta topped with the salsa verde, a dollop of ricotta, fresh black pepper and more grated pecorino.

CRACKERS BY HAND, SWEET POTATOES AND BLUEBERRIES

Things Hailee likes: fresh herbs. A little gem lettuce salad with garlicky white bean spread had me snipping around my herb garden, throwing chive blossoms in with parsley and dill and basil. It’s so summery! Also: little fried things. I infused the oil for garlic coriander pork chops in a way that gave me fried slivers of garlic for the final topping. I fried mint leaves to go on charred sweet potatoes with chunky peach vinaigrette. Is it worth the fuss, next time I make this? Not really, but I appreciate a flourish. 

I gravitated toward the recipes in By Heart that spoke to Hailee’s Midwestern roots. I grew up making pierogi by the dozen with the no-nonsense Slovaks on my mom’s side, and worried that doing them solo would be too much of a project. 

Helpfully, the celery root and potato pierogi in By Heart were easy to portion into chunks of time. Make the egg yolk-enriched dough (I saved the egg whites) and the cheesy filling, chill. Roll everything out, cut and fill, boil, chill again. Searing them off with sweet onion for lunch the next day took no time at all. Sure, the recipe said I’d get 30 pierogi and I got 18, but they tasted good! [2] My grandma would be proud. 

Unlike James, I do not make a lot of fresh pasta, despite some flailing in that direction over the years. I borrowed a pasta machine from a lovely chef friend to make spicy chicken-salt sesame crackers, and here’s where that measuring-thickness thing comes in again. Cracker dough rolled to 1/8 inch gave me the baked consistency of the desiccated turkey skin in “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.” Thinner! Is! Better! 

By Heart is no What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking (Caroline Chambers’ latest, recommend) but it does have a handful of quick weeknight meals, including a dairy-centric brie and butter sandwich with shallot-y frisée that I modified with CSA greens. These recipes are arguably better for weekend cooking, and some gave me a fun excuse to buy a new ingredient, like urfa biber chili flakes or chicken bouillon powder. 

What doesn’t work at all is the index. Hailee, my friend, you want to make a cookbook people will actually use? INDEX. Why can I not look up “kohlrabi,” when you literally have a chunky kohlrabi potato salad in this book? Why have you categorized chocolate-chunk sesame scones under “chocolate” and not also under “scones?” Readers should be able to quickly find the two cakes you randomly put under “Italian American Favorites” instead of “Shareable Sweets.” Why is there nothing under “cakes?” Girl, I know you got a big advance. Pay an indexer. 

All of that said — my favorite recipes in this book so far, two I will absolutely make again, are the Midwestern fish fry and the pretzel blueberry galette with cream cheese whip. I deployed Spotted Cow in the beer batter for my cod because: Wisconsin. My husband Patrick is notoriously anti-condiment and even he loved the caper-and-mustardy tartar sauce, though I’d double the dill and parsley next time. Even someone who’s never fried fish before could succeed with this recipe, the instructions are that clear and straightforward. 

I couldn’t roll the dough for the blueberry situation to a full 15-inch round (small kitchen life), so my galette came out looking kind of like those bullet guys from Mario Kart. This did not matter to my friends, who loved the pretzels in the crust, and the frangipane, and the topping.

Hailee got me using vanilla bean paste, after a lifetime of either extract or full bean. The dough here is as forgiving as a galette/ pie dough gets, and the cream cheese whip knocks regular whip right off the counter. This is a fantastic dessert, and I want to modify it with all the summer fruit. 

BY HEART
(BUY IT / *** BORROW IT ***/ SKIP IT / SCRAP IT)

I enjoyed this cookbook! Hailee’s a clear recipe writer, with techniques and flavor profiles that work. Her voice is approachable, not cheffy at all. I would recommend a borrow-to-buy situation here, as the index is not easy to use and some of the recipes are what I’d call “project cooking,” like sourdough, fresh pastas and pickles. Still, if you’re not already a Hailee Catalano fan, this book could turn you into one. It did for me.  

FOOTNOTES

[1] EDITOR’S NOTE: Foodheim! The subject of the very first Cookbook Test!

[2] EDITOR’S NOTE: The “impossible to roll out the dough as thinly as the author can / claims they can” problem is one with which I am familiar. My Turkish manti are incredibly crude compared to the wispy little things from the cookbook, but they do taste delicious.